When I demonstrated Cisco’s newest network management technologies in my keynote address at Cisco Live last week, there were gasps and applause from the audience as they saw the difference between our next generation technology and the technology our competitors are touting as ‘good enough’.

The technologies I demonstrated (Cisco Prime, UCS Manager and the Cisco Virtual Switching System) are the great results of the more than $5 billion that Cisco invests in R&D on an annual basis. Cisco spends more on R&D than all of our networking industry peers combined and, for the record, we invest five times more (on a percentage of revenue basis) than the next largest networking vendor.

However, what’s more important than the size of our R&D budget is its impact and I’m proud to say that the Patent Board today recognized Cisco as the #1 innovator among 141 companies in its annual Telecom and Communications industry scorecard. Cisco ranked #1 for both the number of patents granted, as well as for the overall strength of the company’s patent portfolio, which is a combined measure of quality and quantity.

That’s a tremendous accomplishment, and I am very proud of our fantastically talented engineers. Credit is particularly due to Cisco Senior Vice President of Research and Advanced Development, Joel Bion, for his tremendous leadership of our R&D efforts. As I often say, great engineers make innovation look easy.

To our customers the message is also clear: whether it’s the 500 patents earned by the recently refreshed Catalyst 6500 (the world’s most popular switching platform) or those awarded in the creation of our ground-breaking Cisco Cius enterprise collaboration tablet, world-beating innovation is something you can always expect from Cisco.

To be competitive, warehouse managers must deliver a high level of performance while reducing costs. Learn how the Cisco and Intermec Mobile Warehouse Management Solution delivers the benefits of mobility to industrial environments, helping warehouse managers to stay connected with their mobile workforce, increasing asset visibility across warehouse operations, providing access to information at the point of work, and delivering intelligence to mobile workers. This is a solution webcast in the “Manufacturing Impact” partner enablement series.

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There will be speakers from Intermec: Dan Albaum, Senior Director Marketing and Bruce Stubbs, Director Industry Marketing. Jeff Rodawald, Partner Relationship Executive will be the speaker from Cisco with me, Peter Granger, as a panelist. Should be a great event with lots of folks already registered. If you’d like to register click the link:

This seminar will focus on Context Aware Solutions. Within today’s manufacturing environments, tracking assets and people is crucial for promoting efficiencies in business processes and ultimately reducing costs and time to market. The AeroScout Visibility System accurately locates and tracks valuable assets such as equipment or people. By operating over Cisco® Unified Wireless networks, AeroScout solutions minimize the incremental cost for the communications network and enable greatly enhanced visibility throughout the enterprise. The solution can scale to include tens of thousands of tags, without affecting other traffic on the network.

Industrial Intelligence is a multi-billion dollar opportunity growing at approximately 20% per year over the next five years. Much of the growth is driven by the proliferation of smart devices globally, and Cisco partners have a unique opportunity to provide the technology to connect an estimated trillion devices by 2020. In this “how to” workshop, the speakers will introduce the Cisco Industrial Intelligence for Manufacturers market opportunity, target customers, solution portfolio, case studies, and sales tools to help partners succeed.

The Just a quick reminder for Cisco Partners to attend the Cisco and Librestream Partner Webinar tomorrow (9th June 2011) at 8.00am Pacific. Find out about the exciting new solution that’s being adopted worldwide by customers like Boeing, GE and FIAT.

Remember how I told you I was really excited by this new Cisco and Librestream MMVC solution. Lots of information out on the web, and lots of questions so I thought I’d put a brief video together to give you an introduction and to see if we can get a discussion going and also to see if we can answer some of the questions for you. It addresses what really matters to many customers. What are the pain-points that manufacturers and industry have today? How do they get hold of the right people to fix things if something goes wrong, and how can they say ‘I see what you mean now’ — and really mean it? My original blog gave lots of information.

If you are a Cisco Partner and interested in building a manufacturing industry practice, this webinar is for you!

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